Listen To Ohal’s Heady Acid Park All The Way Through

“I’ve never had a moment of conviction that did not feel prone to doubt, and there has never been a moment of chaos that I couldn’t find meaning in.”

Officially out this Friday June 10 is Brooklyn-based Ohal's debut album Acid Park. The Israeli-born musician — who we've featured for her activism in art — has made a thrilling record of gracefully collaged synths, samplers, and vocals that plays heavily with song structure and traditional composition. With all that carefully layered consonance, Ohal weaves a narrative through which an intricately constructed pop record is imagined. In an email to The FADER, Ohal reflected on her headspace during the making of Acid Park:

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Acid Park is a cyclical listening unit that can either be engaged with on the song level, or as ambient sound work. The songs were built as collages working with field recordings, samplers, synthesizers, and voice. When I started working on the record I was thinking a lot about the tension between moments of chaos and meaning, and the feeling of endlessly going back and forth between them. I've never had a moment of conviction that did not feel prone to doubt and to a complete loss of meaning, and there has never been a moment of chaos that I couldn’t find meaning in.

It’s a strange flickering path that connects the two states: on one end there's a strong sense that what around us is absurd, a random sequence of fragmented elements that we compile into a narrative to form a cohesive experience. On the other end there’s meaning that we carve out of patterns and structures that we recognize in the chaos. Sometimes flickering between the two feels intentional, like letting your eyes go in and out of focus. Other times it feels like a tide that washes over you. On a musical level, I wanted to make an album that traces the interaction between the two states and dwells comfortably in chaos as much as it does in meaning. Gradually organizing chaos into song form, I wanted to build narrative and pathos out of soundscape and abstraction.

Listen to Acid Park all the way through below, and preorder it from Bandcamp or iTunes.